David Hewson - The Fallen Angel

She thought for a moment.

‘Dunno really. When we came here it just seemed the natural thing to do. It’s not like America. Or Canada. Or anywhere else. Rome’s a little world, all its own.’ She glanced out of the window of the cafe by the Piazza Venezia, at the busy square beyond, and its monumental buildings, Aracoeli, the Capitoline museums, the hideous Vittorio Emanuele monument the locals called ‘the typewriter’, the ‘wedding cake’ and much worse. ‘All that history. . it sort of swallowed me. I felt at home, and I’d never felt that about anywhere before.’

Mina sucked on the straw of her Coke.

‘I talked to Daddy. I told him this was what I wanted to do when I grew up. To write about Rome. To tell people about all the things they never saw. To open their eyes. He said. .’ Mina Gabriel seemed to be trying to recall his exact words. ‘He said I should let this place infect me as much as I possibly could. Haunt me. Like a ghost. Or a. .’ One more hunt for the correct term. ‘. . succubus. Something that possesses you. You won’t understand. If you grew up here you’d take it for granted. I know I would.’

Costa didn’t say anything. He was stealing a glance at her right hand again, wondering if the scratches there were really the work of a cat.

She leaned forward and looked up into his face.

‘I could show you if you like,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Show me?’

‘Yes. The places. Beatrice’s places.’

‘You’ll have things to do.’

‘I told you. Mummy won’t let me. We could go on the tour I invented for Joanne. It would be good to get out. To talk to someone new. I hate sitting around doing nothing. I get that from Daddy. Everyone said we were alike. Peas from the same pod. There were two things he loathed more than any other. Idleness and hypocrisy. Please.’

Costa couldn’t think of a way to say no. In his head he was trying to frame a different question.

‘How did you get on with your father?’ he asked.

She stared straight into his face, her wide, young eyes unblinking, and said, ‘I loved him. And he loved me. That’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?’

‘Exactly,’ he said.

Mina Gabriel checked her watch then picked up the music case.

‘I’ve got to go to the church now. I’m doing this for him. Daddy adored this piece. Odd really. It’s religious. Everything Messiaen did was. Look.’

Mina opened the bag and showed him the music: Transports de joie d’une ame devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne.

‘ Ecstasies of a soul before the glory of Christ, which is its own glory ,’ Mina translated. ‘A very long title, if you ask me. Ridiculously so. We just call it Transports de joie .’

She finished her Coke then went to the counter and bought a chocolate bar, ripping off the wrapping, taking a big bite.

‘Want to come and listen?’ she asked, mouth half-full.

‘I’m not a Catholic.’

‘Me neither. It’s just music. Got to feed the cats at ten thirty tomorrow. We can meet afterwards if you want. Up to you. I don’t mind being on my own. Honest.’

They crossed the Piazza Venezia together, dodging the fractious traffic, then ascended the broad sweep of steps that led up to Santa Maria in Aracoeli, St Mary of the Altar of Heaven. It was one of his favourite Roman churches, in part because its name alluded to another, pagan past. Perched on the Capitoline hill overlooking the Forum, this was once the site of an important imperial-era temple. Images of the Emperor Augustus and the Tiburtine Sibyl still stood on the high altar, commemorating the legend that Augustus had received a vision of the coming of the Catholic Church from the Sibyl herself, in his temple on this very spot. Rome’s distant and near pasts, two different though related kinds of superstition, converged in the darkness of this quiet and holy place, and lived there happily, side by side.

The organ stood in a dark corner of the cavernous church. Mina Gabriel disappeared behind some nearby curtains and returned wearing an ecclesiastical gown that made her look like a choir girl. Then she climbed onto the long bench in front of the instrument. He watched how she positioned herself easily over the keyboard, the stops and the vast array of pedals beneath her feet, as if coming home.

He took a seat at the end of a row, half-hidden in the shadows. The low, sonorous growl of the instrument grew out of the persistent gloom of the nave, seeming to come from everywhere. The music was like nothing he’d ever heard, both harmonious and discordant, free-flowing, without the conventions of time and melody which he expected. There was something ethereal yet disturbing in its clashing tones. As he watched, the girl seemed to become a part of the device, one more complex component of the vast, incomprehensible machine in front of her.

The sun shifted position. A ray of sunlight burst through one of the high church windows. It fell on her left cheek and he saw that the white skin there was wet with tears, awash with some released emotion she’d kept back for the shade of the basilica.

The sight of her touched him, more than he expected, more than he wanted. Costa found his own eyes growing damp as he followed her anxious, taut body flying over the keys and stops and pedals of the ancient organ, extracting from the instrument the composer’s tortured paean to an invisible yet omnipresent creator, a frail young girl trapped entirely by its mechanisms and the effect they produced.

He wiped his face with his sleeve and quietly walked out by the side door, to the little staircase that led up to the more familiar Campidoglio, the summit, a stage in stone set by Michelangelo to mark the caput mundi , the head of the world.

The early evening was airless and hot. There was no time to return home before the meal Peroni had organized. He sat in the piazza, in the shadow of the great bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on horseback, waiting, thinking, wondering.

FOUR

Peroni’s choice of restaurant was always likely to prove controversial, with Falcone at least. When Costa arrived, feeling more than slightly grubby and sweat-stained, the small gathering was standing in the Piazza delle Cinque Scole, directly opposite one side of the squat mass of the Palazzo Cenci on its little hill.

‘There must be somewhere else,’ Falcone complained, arms folded, face suffused with heat. He had looked a little leaner of late, which made his silver goatee seem somewhat theatrical, almost like that of a stage wizard. In a pale linen suit, stiff with outrage in this modest corner of Rome, his anger seemed almost comically petulant, a point not lost on Agata Graziano, who stood to one side with Teresa, scratching her petite dark nose to hide her mirth. Agata and Falcone had enjoyed a long, secret and somewhat strange bond. She was an orphan child who grew up in a convent school. As a young cop Falcone had secretly donated part of his salary to charity, perhaps out of a sense of guilt at the failure of his own marriage. It had been used to pay for Agata’s education. When Falcone discovered this, ever curious, he had arranged to meet the young girl, liked her, and the two had come to form an odd bond, close yet detached too, both grateful to the other for something they rarely acknowledged. Unconsciously, perhaps against his own wishes, Falcone had become in some sense a substitute yet distant parent. The relationship allowed her rather more leeway with him than was afforded to most.

‘I like the look of it, Leo,’ Agata said cheerily. ‘You don’t have to eat in a fancy restaurant every day, do you?’

‘It’s not even a restaurant, really, is it?’